A technician shoots virtual zombies in a mobile augmented reality game called ARhrrrr.

Augmented reality

At Qualcomm’s Sorrento Valley headquarters, Jay Wright holds a Nexus One smart phone over a game board. Up pops Blue Bomber — one of the two robotic fighters in the classic Rock’em Sock’em Robots children’s game.

Except Blue Bomber isn’t real. He moves forward to punch his opponent only on the phone. Look away from the phone screen, and all that’s there is the game board.

This is mobile augmented reality — one version for which Qualcomm has high hopes. The technology uses the camera on a smart phone to trigger software that displays three-dimensional graphics onto real-world images.

Proponents of this technology think it has big potential as smart phones get more processing horsepower. Mobile games, like Rock’em, Sock’em Robots, is one possible market for augmented reality applications. Mattel plans to release a commercial version of the game, said Wright, a Qualcomm director of business development.

Instructions — or how-to guides — that pop up on the phone for assembling everything from furniture to electronics also have potential for the technology. So do education applications. “If you’re teaching physics, why not build a little interactive 3-D physics simulation that looks like it’s sitting on the textbook page instead of a bunch of static diagrams?” said Blair MacIntyre, head of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech University. “If you want to teach about anything geometric, doing it in 3-D on the hand-held, that would be much more clearly understandable.” And then there’s advertising — where augmented reality may have its biggest bang. Marketers like the technology because it allows them to reach shoppers closer to the merchandise.

An augmented reality app, for example, could entice shoppers to purchase by showing something fun when they point their phones at the product — such as having the bee on a Honey Nut Cheerios box come to life, fly around and wink.

Or shoppers could see graphics announcing promotions. Or they could get more information about the product on their phones.

“What we’re enabling now is interactive media at the point of sale, which is a huge thing for marketers,” said Wright. “We think this can be big and folks will put a lot of money into it. There are a lot of ways that creative marketers can use augmented reality to build a better relationship with their customers.”

Augmented reality has been around for years, but mostly for nonmobile uses, said Oren Raviv, senior analyst for emerging technologies with IDC, an industry research firm.

Its roots date back to aircraft maintenance, where workers repairing complex wire harnesses would overlay a schematic on a display screen as they were working on the harness, so they knew where wires should go without having to constantly turn away and consult the paper schematic. In televised football games, the yellow first-down line that’s common in today’s broadcasts is another example of augmented reality in action for non-cell phone uses.

“The launch of the iPhone, followed by mass adoption of smart phones equipped with global positioning systems, cameras and powerful processors, paved the way for the rise of mobile augmented reality,” said Raviv.